Primer: Taylor Swift

Latest release: 2010’s Speak Now, her third
album, which expands the platinum template of richly textured portraits
of shallower emotions through hook-laden New Country balladeering to
embrace pre-ripped pop-punkishness and, on “Dear, John,” acid-washed
blues.

Why you care: Despite somewhat desperate reports to the contrary, Taylor Swift is not the last best hope of a beleaguered music industry.She
may be about the only newly minted artist to move product comparable to
the dinosaurs that hawked best-ofs in those pre-millennial glory days,
but she’s also sold the most digital downloads by some stretch. Rather
more impressively, she’s done so without even the slightest hint of a
public persona. Beyond a somewhat forced casualness midst album asides
and genuinely amusing self-deprecation through stunts like her T-Pain
collaboration, there’s a certain steely eyed careerism lurking behind
any such rapid coronation. In retrospect, even the startled
embarrassment after Kanye West—like numerous other Swift targets, he
earns a dig on her new album with “Innocent”—interrupted her 2009 VMA
acceptance speech seems perfectly choreographed, if only by the pop
gods, to emphasize a supposed fragility. On this tour, sure to be the
summer’s most lucrative, she’ll be cranking up the Broadway fantasia,
fleshing out the most personal of songs with fireworks, acrobats and
show-stopping set pieces. There are technicolor confections to fulfill
the dearest wishes (revenge or romance) and Disney-fied dreams ofprincesses of all ages, but one can’t help but wonder how her subjects will respond as she ascends the throne.